During a radio interview in Iowa with conservative talk-show host Jan Mickelson, once-and-likely-future Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a seemingly commonsensical claim when probed about his lifelong faith, Mormonism: “I understand my faith better than you do.” When Mickelson hesitated in his response, Romney burst out, “You don’t believe that, do you?” As has been the case for many marginalized groups, a big part of Mormonism’s continuing “image problem” is that since the movement’s inception in 1830, non-Mormons—indeed, often anti-Mormons—have often exercised greater authority than Mormons themselves in publicly defining the “true” nature of Mormonism. However, even the most sympathetic outsider is bound to miss crucial complexities that arise within the lived experience of any tradition, including Mormonism. The Romney-Mickelson exchange was instructive in this regard. Taking Romney to task for his inconsistency on the abortion question, Mickelson repeatedly quoted an official pronouncement of the church that names excommunication as a penalty for those involved in abortion. In rebuttal Romney referred to church leaders and members he personally knows who support a pro-choice position. Mickelson, the outsider, based his charge of hypocrisy on the dogmatic formulations of ecclesiology, and Romney, the insider, refuted him by appealing to the nuances of culture.
It is to this tricky terrain of Mormon culture that Terryl Givens, professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond and himself a Mormon insider, turns in People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture. Givens adopts for Mormonism a strategy similar to the one Grant Wacker deployed in his sympathetic study of Pentecostalism, Heaven below. He attempts to rescue a religious tradition that has so often been reduced to a two-dimensional caricature by lingering over the rich tensions within that tradition. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which lays out four foundational “paradoxes” of Mormon culture: authority and radical freedom, that is, Mormons’ simultaneous conviction in the institutional revelations of their prophet and their personal revelations as individual believers; epistemological certainty and endless questing, which refers to the Mormon “mix of intellectual certitude and intellectual insatiability”; the sacred and the banal, by which Givens revisits what he elsewhere calls the Mormon “heresy”—the collapse of sacred distance; and election and exile, or the Mormon oscillation between a defiantly particularist and a recuperatively universalist attitude toward a non-Mormon world. Parts 2 and 3 trace the instantiation of these paradoxes in various cultural arenas—intellectual life, architecture, music and dance, theater, literature, the visual arts and film—over two historical periods: from 1830 to 1890, at which point the LDS Church formally abandoned polygamy, and from 1890 to the present. Givens’ training as a literary scholar enables him in these latter sections to provide often remarkably sensitive and sophisticated readings of a startling range of cultural productions, as in his interpretation of Mormon filmmaker Richard Dutcher’s 2005 States of Grace, which intricately weaves a theological critique of Mormonism’s difficulty with the concept of grace into plot synopsis and aesthetic commentary.
This book, continuing Givens’ path-breaking engagement with his own faith tradition, is rightly destined for landmark status. His work of scholarly synthesis and survey reveals his mastery of both primary and secondary sources. He recovers some real gems here: who either knew or fully appreciated that Brigham Young’s role as a Peruvian high priest in a Nauvoo production of Pizarro would convince him that one of the first orders of business in the Utah desert was the building of a sumptuous theater; or that a 1959 Time magazine article pronounced Mormonism “the dancingest denomination in the country”; or that Mormonism has since the late 19th century spawned a host of self-conscious artistic movements calling for a “home-made music,” “a home literature,” and now a Mormon film industry, the results of which have often conflicted with official delineations of Mormon distinctiveness? By turning to the realm of culture and conceiving Mormonism as a “field of tension,” Givens paints a much fuller picture of Mormonism than has previously been offered, one that attunes the reader to the internal depth and diversity of a tradition that is often perceived as mindlessly homogeneous.
But perhaps the most convincing evidence of Givens’ thesis is the fact that his own book is itself a field of tension. On the one hand, Givens clearly wants to debunk the stereotype of Mormonism as a shallow, conformist culture that mechanically responds to its authoritarian leaders. Yet, from the outset, he converts what he alternately terms Mormonism’s distinctive “tensions,” “polarities,” and “sources of strain”—terms that evoke the messiness of human history unfolding—into a set of elegant theological paradoxes originating in the mind of Joseph Smith. His premise is that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young alone stand as “the twin pillars” upon which “the Mormon intellectual and cultural heritage rests” and that “Mormon life was more thoroughly pervaded by [Young’s] temporal and spiritual dictates than was that of any comparable group of individuals in American history.” Contemporary practitioners of cultural studies may wince at such an unabashedly élitist conception of how culture and history are made. To his credit, I suppose, Givens admits that his study “excludes vast swaths of material and popular culture, including folk expressions in art and music and media from furniture to quilts,” and that “in a church and culture increasingly dominated by a Southern rather than Western hemispheric membership, some of the conceptual categories and distinctions implicit in my treatment—like ‘high culture’ or ‘serious art’—are already in the process of losing their authority.” However, questioning the validity of categories like “high culture” and “serious art” is by no means confined to the Southern hemisphere! Such has been the task of social and cultural historians and theorists in the West over the last several decades. Givens’ study would have been greatly enriched if he had adopted the more critical conception of “culture” current in the contemporary academy. This might have prompted him to take up even more provocative questions: for instance, to what extent—and, if so, why—does modern Mormon culture actually repudiate the teachings of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the other church leaders to whom members supposedly submit unconditionally? What happens if we don’t presuppose a top-down model in our analyses of the formation of Mormon culture?
But even if we follow Givens’ swerve from members to leaders and from the sociocultural to the theological, tensions arise. Paradoxically, his central thesis about Joseph Smith’s Mormonism emphasizes precisely Smith’s adamant refusal to deal in “paradox,” insofar as that word connotes awed resignation before mystery. No one has been more precise or eloquent on this crucial point. Time and again, Givens has suggested that what makes both the form and content of Joseph Smith’s quintessentially Romantic theology distinctive is its relentlessly dialectical drive to surpass conventional oppositions en route to a dazzlingly heretical cosmology in which human beings are Gods in embryo and Gods were once human, in which a celestialized earth literally becomes heaven and heavenly life becomes a mere continuation of life on earth, flavored by the same sense of dynamism and contingency. Even as Givens attempts in People of Paradox to rechristen this imperative to join heaven and earth, as Brigham Young described it, as a tension between the sacred and banal, he must concede that the Mormon negotiation of the sacred and banal “appears more as a collapse of polarities than as a tension between them.”
In his books and public lectures over the last few years, Givens has increasingly linked the Mormon collapse of sacred distance to a Mormon rhetoric of certainty he both embraces and disavows. He has equated the descriptive literalism of Mormon accounts of their intimate encounters with divine beings with the dogmatic literalism of a fundamentalist belief that cannot entertain the least possibility of ambiguity, arguing, for instance, for the impossibility of a middle-ground position on the Book of Mormon’s authenticity on the grounds that it is too rooted in the facticity of golden plates, contemporary witnesses, and concretely rendered angelic visitations. In Mormonism’s profoundly monistic cosmos, however, it need not be presumed that direct dialogue with God relieves one of the burden of interpretation any more so than direct dialogue with one’s fellow human beings. Language, of course, is never transparent, as Joseph Smith well recognized.[1] As Richard Cummings argued years ago, Joseph Smith’s literalism is often of the “creative” rather than dogmatic sort.[2] We are used to thinking of literalism and liberalism as opposites, but Smith’s Mormonism may present a fascinating exception. After all, his literal-minded deduction that human beings, as children of God, are meant to become Gods themselves amounts to a “conception of human possibility that far exceeds that of humanism and the standard forms of religious liberalism,” Sterling McMurrin notes.[3]
Smith’s literalism often opens up rather than forecloses interpretive possibilities. For instance, his bizarre insistence that the beasts of Revelation are not symbols but actual beings who occupy his many-mansioned heavens was aimed at “learned interpretations” he deemed “flat as a pancake” because they made the universe rather less expansive than he liked. If this sounds like science fiction, you’re right. It is precisely such “radical realism,” Givens notes, that award-winning writer Orson Scott Card sees as the common basis for his Mormon faith and his science fiction. But it is perhaps this “demonstrable affinity” between science fiction, still a widely discredited genre, and Mormonism, the tradition that he would vindicate, that seems finally to disconcert Givens. An aesthetic anxiety precipitates his theological retreat. Givens provocatively argues for the common dependence of modern aesthetics and theology on the notion of the sublime, precisely the notion with which Joseph Smith’s this-worldly Mormonism is so impatient. But, while Givens has always reveled in the theological crisis that Mormonism’s collapse of sacred distance instigates, he now seems troubled, perhaps rightly, by the related aesthetic crisis that ensues: “In a universe devoid of transcendence and sacred distance … how can wonder flourish?” he plaintively asks. Ultimately, it is perhaps Givens’ professional allegiance as a Romanticist, then, rather than his Mormon faith, that decides his theological aesthetics, which just can’t seem to do without a notion of the sublime.
Why doesn’t Givens follow Mormonism’s collapse of sacred distance to its logical conclusion in an aesthetics that abandons the sublime? Perhaps because to do so risks marginalizing Mormonism from a broad tradition of Western Christian humanism, instead highlighting those aspects of Mormonism that recently caused Michael York to include some passing references to Mormonism in his consideration of pagan theology.[4] We’re back to the old question that was renewed by Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy and is unlikely to go away: “In what sense are Mormons Christians?” If we really must move “through the particular to the universal,” as Givens avers in his conclusion, then Mormons and Christians—and pagans, for that matter—must delimit their common ground on the basis of a levelheaded and mutually respectful assessment of their solidarity-building similarities and potentially enriching differences. It may be unfair for evangelicals to dismiss, on principle, Mormon convictions about Christ just because they don’t conform to traditional creeds. But it may also be unfair for Mormons to co-opt the language of evangelical Christians as their own, given this lack of conformity. The richness of the Christian tradition is well established. Givens’ People of Paradox goes a long way towards establishing the richness of the Mormon tradition. The forging of common cause between these vibrant traditions, for political purposes or otherwise, must be undertaken without presuppositions about either intractable differences or self-evident similarities. All parties stand to learn a great deal about each other and themselves from such a dialogue.
Jared Hickman is assistant professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently working on a book project entitled “Black Prometheus: Political Theologies of Atlantic Antislavery.”
1. See Richard Lyman Bushman, “The ‘Little, Narrow Prison’ of Language: The Rhetoric of Revelation,” in Believing History: Latter-day Saint Essays, ed. Reid L. Neilson and Jed Woodworth (Columbia Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 248-61.
2. Richard J. Cummings, “Quintessential Mormonism: Literal-Mindedness as a Way of Life,” in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 92-102.
3. Sterling McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (Univ. of Utah Press, 1965). (NYU Press, 2005), pp. 64, 134, 160, 198.
4. Michael York, Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion (NYU Press, 2005), pp. 64, 134, 160, 198.
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